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Life Story: GG Allin

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He was born as Jesus Christ and died as a notorious hell raiser, the life and times of GG Allin

According to GG Allin's father the second coming of Christ occurred in 1956 at Weeks Memorial Hospital in Lancaster, New Hampshire when Jesus Christ Allin was born. Merle Colby Allin Sr, told his wife Arleta that Jesus Christ himself had visited him and told him that his newborn son would be a great and all powerful man in the vein of the Messiah. Such high hopes.

Jesus' older brother Merle Colby Allin, Jr. was unable to pronounce "Jesus" properly and kept calling him "Jeje", which became "GG". The family lived in a miserable log cabin with no water or electricity in northern New Hampshire. This served as a backdrop for Allin's father to spiral into the depths of severe mental illness and obviously had huge ramifications for the rest of the family. Merle forbade all conversation in the home after dark, his religious fanaticism became consuming and he was antisocial and abusive to the extreme.

In 1961, Arleta could take no more and filed for divorce from Merle Sr. Allin later recollected this early period of his life in an essay he wrote in the early 1990s:

“The first five years of my life were infested with sickness and violence. It consisted of living in a log cabin in the northern woods of New Hampshire with father, mother and brother. It was an extremely real, primitive, anti-social existence with no running water, little heat, and unbearably claustrophobic…I was immensely sick with asthma, always fighting to breathe amidst emotionally uncomfortable conditions where the wall colors were that of the ever-peeling paint strips…We were more like prisoners than a family. We were prisoners to father, and father was a prisoner of himself. He always had planned to kill my brother and I, then commit suicide with mother. This was brought to our attention on many a blistering occasion. Father despised pleasures around the cabin and would consciously now allow any enjoyable items to enter into our home. If he found anything in our possessions that we enjoyed, he would take it out in the woods behind the cabin and bury it. We were allowed very little contact with others. We had no phone, and activities were limited… But it developed into our world. It’s all we knew at the time...Toward the end of a long, barbaric five years, mother was plotting to engage in our escape. She had previously tried but I was kidnapped in the failed attempt. But finally one day when father was at work in the paper mill, mother packed us up swiftly, leaving behind everything that could not be carried, and we then escaped, leaving behind the first five years of my life. A five years that would be scratched into my soul for eternity.”
— GG Allin, 'First 10 Years'

In 1966, Arleta married again and GG Allin and his brother were from that time raised by their mother and stepfather in East St. Johnsbury, Vermont. Arleta changed her younger son's legal name to Kevin Michael Allin during his first year of school in order to give her son a chance at a normal, mockery-free childhood.

Sadly for GG, a more conventional name made little difference to his experience at school. A poor student, he was placed in special education classes and had to repeat the third grade. He was regarded as a misfit by his classmates and suffered intense bullying. In his sophomore year he began attending school in drag, which he said was inspired by the New York Dolls. It did nothing though to help him fit in with his peers.

When asked about his childhood, GG described it as "Very chaotic. Full of chances and dangers. We sold drugs, stole, broke into houses, cars, etc. Did whatever we wanted to for the most part - including all the bands we played in. People even hated us back then."

Allin graduated from Concord High School, Vermont in 1975 and immediately formed the band Malpractice with several high school friends and his older brother and was the drummer until the band separated in 1977.

His debut as a frontman came with The Jabbers between 1977 and 1984. The band recorded a number of tracks which Allin played drums and performed vocals. In 1980 came Allin's debut release, Always Was, Is and Always Shall Be. Allin was a standard punk rock frontman in the vein of Iggy Pop and Stiv Bators and his music was a mix of power pop and hardcore punk. By this time though, Allin had got into heroin. He was never going to be an art student making bold situationist comments through music so he became a troubled junkie, assualting and abusing people, existing to be hated. Tensions within The Jabbers began to mount as Allin became increasingly uncontrollable, vicious, and uncompromising. The Jabbers discontinued, and the members parted ways.

The mid eighties saw Allin move from band to band, some released music that was acknowledged by the East Coast hardcore scene but largely Allin remained largely ignored. He had married Sandra Farrow but this was to be shortlived as he left her for a teenage fan, Tracy Deneault, having a daughter with her in 1986, Nicoann, though the couple never married and not much more is known about the relationship.

By the late 1980s, Allin was addicted to heroin and alcohol and took whatever he could lay his hands on. He was filthy, rarely washing and had developed the party trick that he will forever be most famous for, taking laxatives before performances and throwing his faeces at the audience or smearing himself with the mess. He often physically and sexually assaulted audience members, actively encouraged violent riots and damage to venues and often saw gigs cut short because he was arrested. His constant touring was only ever interrupted by prison or hospital stays.

“GG Allin, this New Hampshire loser, appeared at the Cat Club, wearing only a jockstrap and cowboy boots. He started shouting the moment he came out, after shitting in his hands and wiping it on his chest. Then he bashed the microphone into his mouth, nose and eye sockets, a shiny red mask spreading across his face. He stretched his jock aside and pulled hard on his little dick. He broke bottles on the ground and rolled in them. Back up on stage now, there was other stuff on the floor (vomit?), and his butt and legs, besides his face, were bleeding. On his back, sometimes doggy style, Allin would shove the microphone into his anus. Then he went into the second number.”
— RJ Smith, Village Voice, review of Cat Club show Oct. 6, 1986

“After the set I sneaked backstage to say hello. The band was hurriedly packing up, eager to get the hell out, when GG stumbled in, covered in blood and shit, shards of glass still embedded in his back. ‘What’s the mattah?’ he asked earnestly, in a stately New England twang that would do the Kennedys proud. ‘You guys pissed at me?’ Somehow he managed to get a cab to the Port Authority, where he caught a bus to his home in New Hampshire, still naked but for the jockstrap, still covered in shit and blood, and not ashamed. The cops left him alone because they thought he was a victim.”
— Mike Edison, describing the infamous Cat Club show, Screw magazine, 1986

Allin saw this behaviour as groundbreaking, describing himself as "the last true rock and roller" the embodiment of danger, anti-authoritarianism, rebelliousness. Allin saw his music and performances as a means to return rock and roll to what he saw as its roots, reclaiming it from the corporate system. This attitude saw him attracting a small but dedicated following of die hard fans who respected his kamikaze approach to life and his no rules nihlism.

Allin became obsessed with serial killers, befriending John Wayne Gacy who painted a portrait of Allin, which became the album cover to the soundtrack of the film, Hated: GG Allin And The Murder Junkies. According to Gacy, Allin was "a good kid" but that he "smelled like the worst piss-soaked wino".

Live appearances continued in the usual vein with the added attraction of threats of on stage suicide but were interrrupted in 1989 when Allin was accused of the rape and torture of a female acquaintance. Allin didn't deny burning the woman, cutting her and drinking her blood, he did however claim it was consensual. He pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of assault and was imprisoned from he was imprisoned from December 20, 1989 – March 26, 1991 using the time to write and publish The GG Allin Manifesto.

Allin's release led to more gigs, the footage of which were made into Todd Phillips documentary Hated: GG Allin and the Murder Junkies. Allin had become nothing more than a circus side show though. He was not by any standards accepted as a musician that was pushing boundaries and was largely ignored by everyone except talk show hosts like Jerry Springer and Geraldo Riviera who treated him as little more than a pantomime villain on daytime television.

GG Allin's final performance was in New York in 1993. He took to the stage, high, filthy and hitting out at the audience. During the second song of the set the power failed and GG started to smash the stage up in anger. He put his head through a pain of glass and left the club with blood dripping down his face to go and party and his friend Johnny Puke's apartment. Marching through the streets covered in vomit, excrement and blood, his fand followed leaving upturned bins and chaos in their wake. They threw bottles at police cars and a mini riot ensued. After an hour or so, the band led by Allin escaped the mayhem that they and the fans had caused and reached the apartment where the party continued.

Drugs and the alcohol were consumed in large quantities and GG snorted alot of heroin, so much so that he collapsed. This didn't stop fans posing with the unconscious Allin for photographs. Allin had actually already died but nobody noticed until the next day when he was discovered on the floor of the apartment surrounded by the sleeping bodies of his friends. He was thirty-six.

Allin's wake could only be described as a fittieng tribute to the way he lived his life. It was a party of epic proportions with guests pouring bourbon and stuffing drugs into his mouth as he lay in the open casket. At his brother's request, GG wasn't cleaned or dressed and lay in his jock strap and filthy leather jacket covered in dried blood and excrement surrounded by bottles of bourbon and photographs of his performances. Once again fans, posed with his lifeless body, some even moving his jockstrap aside to laugh at the size of his penis. With friends like that...

Here's some classic GG moments in life and in death, not for the faint hearted though if you've read this far you'll probably cope.